


through hell or high water

by poetatertot



Series: dreaming on fire [5]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Dreamwalking, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Mentions of Apocalypse - Freeform, Mild Skinning, The Shower Scene (TM), Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-26
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-07-18 00:23:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16106858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poetatertot/pseuds/poetatertot
Summary: Neil’s history with his dreams is short. He can’t remember the last time he’d woken with them still intact—can’t think of a time where he could pull up dreams from memory. He’s always slept in silence or not at all.What's changed? Who are the voices calling to him in his sleep?Why now?Or,A key, a confrontation, and one last stand against Neil's waking nightmares.





	1. Ignition

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone who follows me on tumblr knows I've been sitting on this idea for _weeks_ , but my computer broke (on top of other stuff) and I couldn't get it out until now. 
> 
> We're ramping up the dream factor for this piece. Get ready.
> 
> Enjoy!

The world is falling apart.

Neil can feel the earth crying beneath him—terrible groans, rumbling from somewhere deep that should never know pain. Tremors ripple up his legs and knock his knees together. His whole body _hurts._

The world is falling apart, and all he can do is fall with it.

He looks up. The moon is a bloody eye closing, a scarlet beacon dripping viscera on a city that only knows how to die. No stars are left in the sky; in their absence, the heavens open up into ugly, empty void that kisses the shadows of crumbling buildings.

Black and red—the colors of a specter long forgotten.

Neil is not afraid. He’s come to terms with this too long ago, back when life was running and hiding and being too afraid to sleep. _Life is a cycle,_ his mother had told him, _and we are just pieces of nothing inside it. We are nothing._

_I am nothing._

Buildings fade to ash under his touch. An invisible wind carries debris from where he steps, pulling cinders into a fiery whirlwind that lights everything to blaze. He breathes and tastes smoke and char, scorched earth and burning life.

_I am nothing._

His shadow stretches before him, black and jagged like a saw’s edge. _No,_ he thinks. _A cleaver._ The shape of one pools into his right hand, a whisper of an idea, and then the shadow is expanding, stretching and rising to loom over him.

A shadow, a specter, a father.

_Did you forget?_

The cleaver rises.

_You are my own blood._

Nathaniel laughs.

_You are—_

Neil’s eyes snap open. Darkness stretches to the edge of his vision, suffocating him in its clutches. He open his mouth to breathe, struggling around the weight of his lungs, and fumbles for the lamp.

The light burns bright enough to make him squint. He welcomes the pain, letting his eyes water as he stares at the time. _2:58am._

A dream. It had only been a dream.

He should be comforted. Demons have no place in the living world; his nightmares can’t reach him here, tucked away inside of the Foxhole Court apartments. He’s awake, alive, _safe._

But Neil knows better. Dreams are born from reality; nightmares are born from dreams.

He lays there staring at the ceiling until Matt’s alarm tells them both to get up.

.

Neil’s history with his dreams is short. He can’t remember the last time he’d woken with them still intact—can’t think of a time where he could pull up dreams from memory to peruse later. He’s always slept silence or not at all.

_Why now?_

He goes through the motions: a warm-up run, a morning routine of practice and scrimmaging, a shower and a breakfast. He doesn’t feel any of it. The world passes underneath his fingertips as a blur, cold and far away from his thoughts. He can’t settle on anything but being unsettled.

Andrew corners him behind the local gas station, trapping him with dark eyes and a rolling paintbrush. Today’s community service—painting over graffiti on the local gas station, though why anyone cares is beyond Neil— split up their usual crew into a trio and pair; though far quieter without Nicky, Kevin’s nosy propensities prevent them from sharing any serious words.

“You’re somewhere else.”

Neil trails one finger over an old scrape in the plaster. Remnants of a struggle, maybe, or an accident? “I’m—” He blinks, pulling his hand away. “Do you ever dream?”

One eyebrow lifts. “I don’t sleep well.”

“But when you do.”

“No.”  
  
Neil chews his lip. “Always?”

Andrew stares at him for a long moment. He turns away, magically procuring a cigarette and lighter, and promptly lights up. “Having trouble sleeping?”

Neil shakes his head. If sleeping were the problem, he would’ve had thousands of dreams on the road—thousands of nightmares crawling out of his mental hellscape, burning through his skin into reality. “The opposite. I’ve never remembered a dream before, but now all of a sudden—” He shrugs with one shoulder. “It’s strange.”

“We live in a strange world.”

There’s not much Neil can say to that. He plucks the cigarette from Andrew’s lips, sucking in just enough to slow his heart, and tells himself he must be wrong.

But he rarely ever is.

.

That night, he dreams of the specter again. It follows him from building to building like a shadow, laughter crawling inside his ears to pick at his brain. The blade’s edge dances at the surface of his skin, cold and cruel, always threatening to slice meat from bone.

He doesn’t scream when it does—but he does wake up.

He wakes up, and remembers.

.

“You look like shit,” Matt remarks cheerfully. “No offense.”

Neil squints up at him. He’d barely been able to sleep after his second bout of nightmares, but Matt smiles like a lighthouse beacon. He glows almost bright enough to hurt Neil’s eyes. “What’s the good news?”

“Does there need to be any?”

Neil shovels cereal into his mouth and waits.

Exactly five seconds pass before Matt lets it out. “Alright, you’re never going to believe this. I was at the secondhand yesterday and found the coolest thing for our living room.”

“An AC unit?”

He gives him a withering look. “You’re killing me, Neil.”

“So it wasn’t a fan either.”

“No, it wasn’t a fan.” Matt sighs, reaching over Neil’s head for a clean bowl. “It was a beanbag. Well, two of them. Pretty cool, right?”

“I don’t know.” Toast pops out of the toaster—black, burned beyond saving. Neil frowns down at it. “Do we need beanbags?”

“Well, _no_ , but they’re good to have. We can use them when we have movie night.”

Neil doesn’t bother pointing out that _movie night_ has rapidly become _Dan and Matt’s Date Night._ “Okay.”

“I just never noticed before, you know? How empty it is in here. I didn’t even notice when..” Matt stares out at the living room, eyeing blatant wall cracks and open carpet covered in stains. He turns, catching Neil’s eye, and breaks into a tired smile. “It’s not that he was bad or anything. Just—well. He was Seth.” The name dies halfway out his mouth like an exhale.

The Foxes’ muteness surrounding their late teammate has always seemed curious. To Neil, death is no less odd than life—a peculiarity that they all exist in, fleeting as the day is long. You got up, or you didn’t. You withstood, or you didn’t.

You lived, or you didn’t.

Neil had heard a little about Seth before. Andrew and his family members didn’t tiptoe around the topic the way the older team members did. He suspected their silence had less to do with honoring the guy’s memory—he’d heard of Seth’s opinions, as well as his vices—and more to do with the fact that he was Allison’s boyfriend up until he died.

But speaking ill of the dead wasn’t going to bring Seth back any more than covering his traces with secondhand furniture. He was another specter lost in his own evils, smothered by the very artifact he chased after.

Dead people; dead memories. _They’re the same,_ Neil thinks, biting into his ruined toast. The bitterness of it burns the back of his throat. _All you can do is pretend to let them go._

 

Word of their outing makes its way around the complex within several hours. By the time evening begins to set, everyone knows exactly where Neil and Matt are headed. They also, by proxy of being Foxes, make it their business to come along.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Neil tells Andrew. “You don’t need to shadow me. I’m not going to run.”

“I’m not shadowing you. I’m going out of my own interests.”

“So you’re shadowing me.”

Andrew gives him a dull look and blows smoke into his face.

“It’s good for us,” Nicky says, tugging a canvas bag over his shoulder. “We need new color around the apartment. The more the merrier, right?”

They walk the mile through Millport like a band of traveling musicians: Dan and Matt at the front, shoving the cart as it threatens to break into a thousand pieces; Allison and Renee behind them, shared bags and soft talk tucked between faces; Nicky, Aaron, and Kevin in the middle, a jumble of pointless arguing and moving hands; Neil and Andrew last, their shadows stretching behind them into the dust.

Andrew’s sharp corners take on their own ink in the dying light; his hair, illuminated to fire and gold. Neil tilts his head sideways and marvels at the glow of his eyelashes, the perfect side portrait of his imperfect features. Seeing him like this tickles something in the back of Neil’s brain—an old memory trying to uncover itself, a sense of familiarity beyond knowing him now. _Deja vu._

His cigarette butt falls underfoot and smears into the pavement. “Don’t look at me like that.”

Neil’s mouth goes crooked with a smile. He can’t help himself and Andrew knows it. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”  
  
“You’re right.” He tilts his head away and smiles into the oncoming night. “I’m not.”

Whatever they have become—a _something_ , even though Andrew insists it’s a _nothing_ —pulls at Neil’s mouth a lot lately. Their outward appearances haven’t changed; the way they push at each other’s buttons echoes early encounters. They aren’t much different from before at all—but.

There’s the quiet moments that come with midnight—time padded with the gauze of faraway stars and open rooftops. A bottle perched between thighs, perched on lips just before they crash and meet Neil’s own. Cigarettes burned into smoke and ash before they can be drawn on.

It’s in moments like those that time ceases to _be_ —when they as people, scraped up to sit in Millport’s dried-out husk, become less than their parts and meld into the shadows as a single entity. One whole ember left to burn into nothing.

Perhaps Andrew was onto something after all.

The secondhand store itself is another hole in Millport’s half-dug graveyard, an ensemble of crumbling plaster and dull window panes lined with dead insects. The door sags off its hinges and traces a deep rut into the dirt where it drags; the store owner, Rusty, sags behind the cash register with his own dirt, grime clear on his hands and in the lines of his neck. He squints as they all file in, cracking gum against his teeth, and fixes Matt with a sharp look.

“Y’all need somethin’ big or what?”

“Just passing for some furniture,” Matt says. He stands up close to checkout to let  everyone pass behind him—an unpleasant experience if Neil’s ever known one, as Rusty always stinks like old spearmint and stale breath. “You still have those beanbags from yesterday?”

Rusty scowls further. “Who else would I sell ‘em to?”

“Just making sure.” Matt bobs his head, settling in for what Neil recognizes as his small-talk stance. Not that it would do any good with Rusty; even with nine years on the road, Neil’s met kinder slabs of concrete. Still, Matt seems determined to hack off part of what they’ll owe for dragging half the store home with them.

Neil leaves him to it. The others are already drifting towards the aisles, rapidly becoming one with the store’s grime in the absence of overhead lighting. Footsteps muffle over layered carpets; bodies meld into rows of junk and stacked furniture. Somewhere to Neil’s left he hears someone sneeze.

He finds Andrew in the clothing section, methodically tugging jackets off their hangers to throw on the ground. The others are nowhere to be found.

“Find anything you like?”

Andrew’s eyes flick up to his and hold for a long moment. He goes back to business. “No.”

“Okay.” He moves over to a cabinet dedicated to accessories. Everything inside looks worth less than the glass its kept behind, all dusty plastic and fraying appliques. There’s plenty of shit that Neil’s pretty sure should never go on someone either—jagged safety pins and odd bits that look more like garbage picked off the sidewalk. He wouldn’t be surprised if Rusty had.

But there, tucked behind a Christmas broach, something shines brand-new.

Neil looks up and all around. There isn’t a single camera.

The hinges hiss as he picks open the door. The objects inside smear rust against his fingertips, an incriminating red that paints his fingernails when he digs and pulls out what he wants without a sound.

A key.

Matt’s voice echoes through the store, dragging them back up to the front. They settle their payment—extra hands to sort junk in the upcoming weeks—and make way with the beanbags crammed into the cart’s rickety ribcage.

It’s only when they’re all the way home, new furniture dumped over old stains and half the Foxes out of the house, that Neil pulls the key out for a better look.

Silver, simple. It bites into his palm with imperfect teeth, pressing a negative image of a mountain range, and Neil admires the pinprick line below his fingers. He can’t imagine what the key might go to. Would it even be useful if he did?

“It’s just a key.” Andrew exhales smoke over the rooftop’s edge. “It has no use.”

Neil tucks it back into his pocket, feeling it clink against an old quarter. “You of all people should know it’s never just a key.”

Andrew’s face blinks back through the dark, impassive as always, but he doesn’t disagree.

.

He dreams of beginnings: time unfolding like an opened map, waxy paper shiny new and freshly bent; the first step onto just-cool pavement, testing its give; the first miles ticking on a car dashboard, scaling up as they rush from an aftermath.

He dreams of endings: doors falling off their hinges into dust; keys snapping in locks that lead to nowhere and nothing; the last breath of life curling dead before something heavier, greater, darker.

He dreams of another time, another place—another body, maybe, that doesn’t own as many memories as his own—where the wallpaper isn’t curled to ash and blood hasn’t permanently stained the floorboards beneath runner carpets. Where the clock still ticks on the wall and chimes when it hits a new hour.

He’s in the hallway when the hour turns. The world echoes with rumors he hasn’t yet heard, promises not yet broken but soon to be. The grandfather clock booms the newness of _now, now, now_ —and the front door begins to rattle.

He’s home.

The door jiggles. The lock, heavy with metal tumblers turning and clicking, wiggles ever so quietly in the frame. A key clinks from the other side.

He's home.

_Neil, what do we do when daddy comes home?_

The door swings open. A shadow, a specter, a demon come back to life—but had he died at all?

He stares at Neil. Neil stares back, petrified. All of his bones have turned to lead.

_We run._

.

Living with the Foxes means many things—conservation, combined effort, waking at the crack of dawn. Neil welcomes the labor for how close it feels to roadside survival. He already knows how to sweat for his dinner, how to chew dust over a run. These are the things he’s had to excel at or die trying.

The stillness of Millport’s library requires none of that. _Quiet_ expands over countless bookshelves and between stacks like stuffy air, blanketing and choking Neil every time he steps inside. He knows how to be quiet, yes, but the peace Millport’s library tries to achieve pulls at his bones in a way that makes him nervous. He can’t run there, so he does his best to stay away.

His best isn’t enough. He comes out of the shower two days after his last nightmare and finds Andrew’s shadow crawling through the screen door. Water droplets are still drying under his clothes, dampening his collar and the line of his spine, outlining hard muscle underneath. Neil’s mouth goes dry at the sight of him.

Andrew taps his fingers against the balcony railing. “Ten minutes.”

It’s barely enough time for Neil to make breakfast and lunch. He slips out to Matt’s chiming farewell with a bagel in his mouth, peanut butter smearing onto the corners of his lips. Andrew gives him an inscrutable look.

“Where are we going today?”

“Bee’s.” Fingers swipe at his lips, wiping away the mess. Neil watches, transfixed, as Andrew brings his fingers to his mouth and licks them clean. “Shelf duty. Don’t try to run.”

Neil keeps pace as they start out the gate. “That’s the problem.” He takes another bite, hoping to quell sudden butterflies, but peanut butter sticks all the way down his throat. “Going there is..” _Quiet. Unpleasant._

Andrew lights up and runs one hand through his hair. Already sweat is beginning to bead at his hairline—an after-effect of the heat or his penchant for black, or both. “You don’t have to like her,” he says. “She’s Bee.”

“She’s a _therapist_.”

“She’s not going to psychoanalyze you.”

Neil scowls, ripping another mouthful free. “She already has,” he mumbles.

His first and last encounter with Betsy was one fraught with anxiety—all his, of course, because Bee was disturbingly serene and seemed to take in every word Neil spoke like it had another meaning. He’d known the second he introduced himself that he wasn’t going to like her. All she did was answer questions with more questions, looking at Neil like she could see inside of his head.

“You’re being dramatic,” Andrew decides, and rips the bagel out of Neil’s teeth. He takes a huge bite and swallows, scowling. “This needs more honey.”

“Honey’s too sweet.”

“Nothing’s too sweet.” But he keeps eating until only crumbs remain.

Millport’s library is a nothing thing. The single-floor structure is all brown and brick. The row of plants lining the walkway are long dead. The windows are utterly dark, thick with grime that betrays nothing of what lies inside.

The library is a nothing thing—but perhaps that’s why Andrew likes it so much. To most, the tiny movements that make up the quieter Minyard twin are nothing but static, but to Neil, they’re everything. He sees the way Andrew’s eyes trail up towards the rafters when they step inside; he watches the rigid line of his square shoulders ease into something like peace, the blades of his knuckles softening beneath skin and flesh. Solace is hard to come by in Millport—impossible to come by just about anywhere—but Andrew’s found his own version in the shade of bookshelves.

Bee sips cocoa from a couch positioned to catch the afternoon light. Multiple books are arranged across the table in front of her, set into stacks of precise angles and even space. Even the stacks on the floor are perfectly streamlined to only contain books of similar size and shape, piling until they shade the woman halfway from watered-down sunbeams.

She smiles at the sight of them. The warmth of it prickles on Neil’s skin like a sunburn; he takes a step back before he can control himself. Beside him, Andrew tilts his head but doesn’t look away from Bee’s rising form.

“Andrew, Neil.” She nods towards her mug. “Cocoa?”

“Not on the books,” Andrew chides. “You know that.”

Her mouth twitches up higher. “Maybe. But.. I just got a new flavor, specially from Tom. Caramel turtle.” She taps her spoon against the rim. A soft chime rings out over the quiet. “It’s delicious.”  
  
Andrew slips his hands into his pockets. “Alright. If you insist.”

“Neil?”

“No thank you. I don’t like sweet things.”

There’s a long moment where Bee looks and looks at him. She nods, getting up to fiddle with the ancient microwave behind the front desk.

“I’m going to get a head start,” Neil announces. Andrew’s already drifting away towards the window, eyes trailing over covers and headlines. Neil leaves him for the stacks.

Bee’s penchant for order dies a slow death between the aisles. Books are organized alphabetically, numerically, even by color in some places, but they never manage to stay neat for long. What takes careful hands hours to set up only takes a couple careless tosses to destroy. Here and there novellas peek out over chapter books, propped upside-down or stacked inside the shelves in obvious afterthought.

 _Big things, small things._ Neil trails his finger over the broken spines of what once was a rainbow. _People come through and destroy them all._

Still, as much as he dislikes Betsy, library community service is by far the easiest. The manual labor doesn’t come with a sunburn, and the breaks come as often as he wants without anyone harping on him. Betsy doesn’t glare at him like she’s convinced he’s going to steal, or follow him around talking his ear off like the bakery owner. She gives him a job and melts back into the walls.

The only problem with doing busy work is that it gives him too much time to think.

Fingers rattle bookshelves; he thinks of the rattling front door. Feet shuffle over old carpet; he remembers walking down the hallways of an old home. Every shadow turns into a flitting memory at his back, a whispering ghost reminding him of who he’s trying so hard to outrun.

_Daddy’s home, daddy’s home. What do we do when daddy’s home?_

Neil stares unseeing at the book in his hands. He can’t quite focus on anything.

“We run,” he whispers.

The lights go off overhead. Instantly the room falls to darkness—a suffocating bag wrenched over his head, tying around his neck until he can barely breathe.

The book in his hand falls from numb fingertips. Neil squeezes his eyes shut and begins to _rattle_ —deep, whole-body movements that wrack his frame like a leaf in the wind. He can feel every breath as it tears out of his throat, slicing and flaying of flesh with the cruel accuracy of miniature knives.

He’d known knives like those before. Hands strong enough to hold him still in one bruising hand and cut him into ribbons with the other. A mouth that curled and crooned promises of pain like a bedtime story.

 _Not a nightmare._ She’d been real—real like the specter of Neil’s thoughts and the scars littering his body—real like his mother's bones in a burning dumpster—real like his father's promise to kill him if he ever got his hands on him again—

“Neil.”

The voice at his left grounds him. If Neil focuses hard enough through the dark he can hear rhythmic breathing—in and out, the even pace of Andrew’s existence right alongside his own.

The tight knot in his throat eases up, just a little.

“Neil,” Andrew repeats.

Neil swallows. He’s suddenly conscious of how hard his hands are shaking. He feels like he’s going to puke.

“Andrew,” he chokes.

The heat of another body quiets the maddening tangle of his thoughts. Andrew doesn't quite touch him, but he’s close enough that Neil can imagine him through the darkness, standing guard at his back between the shelves.

“Yes,” his voice rasps over Neil’s shoulder, “or no?”

Neil squeezes his eyes shut; he opens them again. The world is still the same—near-blinding darkness—but now he can imagine just a little light coming in from the end of the aisle. Just enough to see by.

_“Yes.”_

Careful fingers; quiet touches. A palm-sized warmth curls over one shoulder blade, pushing and seering him forward. The light ahead strengthens with every step until the shapes of bookshelves and open stacks solidify ahead of them. The knot in Neil’s throat loosens a little more.

They find Bee waiting at the end of the aisle. She looks as small as she actually is in the muted light, rumpled and anxious behind her spectacles. Even with how much Neil dislikes her, her presence is a relieving reminder of where they are.

“I’m afraid it's a bit too dark to work by,” she says. Her eyes slide from Neil to Andrew to the contact linking them. “Let's finish up tomorrow, shall we?”

 

The power outage is everywhere.

“Citywide,” Wymack grunts over dinner. They’re all meeting in the downstairs apartment he calls home, cluttering into chairs or sitting on the floor with paper plates of pizza. “Nobody was spared. Archer on Fifth thinks it was a blowout.”

“Too much power?” Dan asks. Wymack nods.

“It’s impossible to say for how long. At least the next couple days before they can get things running again, and the complex generator isn’t as good as it used to be.”

“No late-night baking,” Nicky sighs. “Got it.”

“No anything,” Wymack corrects him. “We’re down to bare minimum here. If you don’t need to use that blender, don’t even have it plugged in. Don’t even _think_ about plugging it in.”

Allison wrinkles her nose. “What, does that include laundry? I’m due for another load!”

“Wash it by hand,” he says flatly. “Hang it to dry. You’ll live.” He looks out over everyone, ignoring Allison’s loud protests. “Any other questions?”

Matt swallows a cheekful of cheese pizza. “Practice?”

“Same as always.” Wymack tilts his head towards the open window. “We’ll get a head-start and prop it all open for ventilation.”

Neil winces internally. An extra half-hour means getting up at 4 o’clock. With how late he’s been staying up with Andrew, they’d have better luck being on time by not sleeping at all.

“If you think I’m going to get up at ass o’clock you’re out of your mind,” Aaron mutters. Wymack raises one eyebrow and fixes him with a glare.

“What else are you going to do?”

“Uh, _sleep?_ ”

“Sleep when you’re dead,” Kevin says, waving his hand. He tosses his uneaten crusts and nods at his dad. “We’ll be there.”

Later, when all the others have washed up for bed and the courtyard’s fallen to a lull, Neil follows Andrew up to the roof. The new vantage point on the blackout doesn’t bode well. Crouched at the gutter’s edge, the whole world beyond looks like a jagged black sea of shadows and poorly-shingled rooftops. Neil feels like he’s one misstep from falling into open, turbulent waters.

Andrew drinks and smokes like he doesn’t have to be up in five hours. Neil admires his dedication.

“You’re not doing yourself any favors,” he says mildly.

“Nobody’s asking you to be here.”

Neil shrugs. It’s not like he’d be able to sleep anyway. His body hasn’t gone off high-alert since the blackout started, leaving his brain wide-awake even though his functions are beginning to flag. If he laid down now he’d just waste hours staring at the ceiling—or worse.

 _Not yet_ , he thinks, taking a drag from Andrew’s cigarette. _I’m not ready to dream yet._

Neil knows Andrew sees right through him. He hasn’t strayed further than ten feet since the blackout—hasn’t been able to keep his eyes or his hands from brushing over Neil’s shape since he dragged him out of the library’s depths. The touches are irregular and unexpected, but Neil knows better than to ask him out loud. It would only push him away.

 But even as Neil’s silent guard between him and the world, Neil knows Andrew has to have questions.

“You can ask,” he tells him, after the moon’s begun to sink. The air’s gone as cold as it ever does, churning up road dust with careless hands. Neil tucks his orange jacket closer to his body.

Andrew looks sideways at him. “No.”

“What, you don’t want to?”

“I don’t need to.”

Neil frowns. “I’m giving you a turn at our game.”

“And I’m not taking it.” He crushes the cigarette butt into the roofing beside them. “Not now.”

Questions bubble up on Neil’s tongue, but he swallows them down. If this is Andrew’s way of showing mercy—another soft hand at his back, the second one today—then he’ll take it for all that it’s worth.

He looks out over their makeshift ocean. “Thank you.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything, but pulls him in for a kiss.

.

When Neil dreams, there’s nothing left.

He stands in a dark room. At the other end, a single digital clock sits on the floor. The hours and minutes are all blanked out to zero, blinking red through the dark.

He’s out of time.

The door behind him creaks open.

.

“The job’s not hard,” the storekeeper says, “but it might be a little messy.”  
  
Neil’s eyes flit over the fridges. Without AC, the weather’s already begun melting the frozen section into oblivion. Baggies of ice cream bars sag in their pens; frozen vegetable boxes drip gently onto the floor. Neil can feel sweat coalescing in his armpits just looking at it all.

“It’s a waste,” the storekeeper goes on, “but there’s nothing else we can do. The dairy isn’t going to wait a couple extra days. Salvage what you can but toss the rest. I’ll be sorting a new shipment if you need me.”

He ducks behind a corner and leaves the three of them without another word.

Neil stands back to look at everything. Kevin picks up a garbage bag. Andrew tears open a bag of wasabi pistachios from the rack behind them.

“You’re not stealing those,” Kevin says reproachfully. “That’s on team funds.”

“It’s not stealing if he doesn’t know they’re gone,” Andrew retorts, and snaps open another shell.

Neil rolls his eyes. “Let’s just get started,” he mutters. He grabs his own bag and gets to work.

The labor is long and arduous. The market isn’t nearly small enough for them to slack off—working security cameras or not—so they’re forced into a rhythm of squeezing, tossing, and wiping. Condensation runs down Neil’s arms like slime. His back begins to ache from constantly reaching overhead for things.

Kevin doesn’t look like he’s faring much better. The habitual movements of freezer-cleaning have turned him into a slow, albeit well-oiled, machine. Every so often he stops to scoff at the ingredient label on something before he throws it away.

Andrew disappears somewhere halfway through his bag of nuts. Wherever he’s gone, Neil knows he’ll at least reappear for lunch or the walk home.

They make it through the first wall of freezers before the front door clicks open.

Kevin ignores the sound. Neil rifles through a couple of broccoli bags before it occurs to him that he can’t hear whoever came inside. It shouldn’t bother him, except for the fact that _nobody_ gets past his radar, even Andrew. The practice is well-honed from years of running.

Somebody is inside, and he can’t hear them.

Something is _wrong._

Neil lets the freezer door swing shut to stretch his arms over his head. He tilts his head back towards the dark ceiling and strains his ears for something, _anything._

Footsteps whisper to a stop behind them.

Slowly, casually, he turns around. The air in his lungs turns to ice.

“Sorry to bug,” Lola Malcolm says, “but do you boys sell any gas?”

Neil parts his lips. He tries to speak. His tongue feels heavy in his mouth, blocky and numb.

“By the can,” Kevin says. He still hasn’t bothered to turn around. “Neil, go show her.”

Neil stares at Lola. She stares back, all toothy smiles and casual stance. She knows Neil won’t run. She knows he can’t. Not with Kevin here.

He forces his feet to move. He has to slip between Lola and the rack of chips to get to the front counter. As he moves past, he can feel the faintest brush of her hand on his hip. Instantly his stomach turns to stone, squeezing tight enough to ache.

 _Speak of the devil and he shall appear,_ his mother had always said. Neil wonders fleetingly if the same thing applies to dreams and memories. If thinking was the fatal flaw in bringing his world to pieces.

He blinks, reaching for the gas cans, and sees the red zeroes behind his eyes. He’s out of time.

“They’re sixty-five,” he tells her. His voice scrapes out like stones over gravel. “Or for a good favor.”

Lola smiles wider. “I have supplies in the car that you might need. Come take a look?”

Neil nods. His hands, trembling violently around the canister, go dreadfully still. He picks it up and follows her outside.

The car is ugly green and nondescript. The plates look too old to be current. Neil stares at the trunk and knows what must be inside—what tools Lola has with her to make his last hours a living hell.

Torture isn’t her specialty, but Lola always said she would make an exception.

They stop in front of the trunk. One haggard hand rests on top of the door, chipped nails tapping away at the metal. Lola looks out over the desolate roads of Millport’s last stand.

“Don’t run,” she suggests, like a comment on the weather. “You’ll regret every minute of your short life if you do.”

A tangle of emotions forces its way up Neil’s throat. Anger, defiance, sadness—he’s had so much offered to him in the past months, and now she was here to rip it all from him.

He thinks of the Foxhole Court apartments and all of the people he’s grown to call family.

He thinks of Millport itself and how its roads have given him a purpose.

He thinks of Andrew, brilliant and terrible Andrew, standing in defiance against a world that wanted to give up on him.

Acid bubbles up onto his tongue. He doesn’t bother swallowing it down.

“You can’t do this,” he whispers. “Not now.”

“No?” Lola’s smile stretches wider, threatening to rip her face in half. “But we’re doing it right now. You remember the rest, right?” She gestures to two figures in the car—unmistakeable, hulking shadows of men Neil wishes he didn’t know. “We’re all here to send you off, once and for all.”

“My team won’t let you go. They’ll know I was taken.”  
  
“And they won’t know where to look for your body.” She tosses her scraggly ponytail over one shoulder. “Not that it’ll be in big enough pieces for them to find.”

 One of the men gets out of the car—Jackson, all muscle made for violence. He leaves the door open and stands aside, one hand at the gun tucked into his belt.

“Get in,” Lola commands.

There’s nowhere else to go. Neil curls his hand around the keys in his pocket: one for the complex, one for the apartment, one for the man that he calls home. He lets himself fold at the waist, sliding into the backseat, dropping the keyring in the gravel as he pulls his right leg in.

He can’t even apologize to anyone, or say goodbye. All he can do is leave a trace, so they know he went unwillingly.

Lola shuts the door behind him. Romero, her brother and partner-in-crime, turns over the engine.

They pull out of the parking lot faster than Neil can put on his seatbelt. It takes all of his willpower not to look back.


	2. Incineration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the rating change for this chapter and chapter three, as well as the new tags. If you're particularly squeamish and want to skip Lola's torture scene, you can stop at "Lola smiles with all of her teeth" and skip straight to "Where are you going?" 
> 
> I've almost never been so excited to post a chapter. Enjoy!

Sometimes, in moments of crisis, people speak of their lives flashing before their eyes. Something happens in the seconds before disaster that allows them to stand at the crossroads and look back the way they came, watching memories unfold like a roll of photo negatives.

Neil sits in the back of the Civic. He waits for his childhood to swarm him—snapshots he’d rather die than see again, if he was being honest—but nothing happens. There are no bittersweet voices in his head, no warm memories that culminate behind his eyes.

Either life has dealt Neil the most uninspiring, regrettable hand, or he’s not dying.

He stares at the back of Lola’s scraggly haircut. _No,_ he thinks. _I’m definitely going to die._

The road beyond Millport is desolate. They’ve driven two hours east now, pushing past the scraggly valley hills towards open desert. Hours from death, the Civic’s AC chokes out hot air; sweat pools in Neil’s pits and on his lower back, slicking skin against the seat. His throat pinches tight, a dry road with no signs of rainy weather.

The hole in his stomach has filled with lead. It’s too uncomfortable for him to feel sorry for himself. Instead, he thinks.

He thinks about how his whole life he’s been running, and how the world seems to have only gotten bigger when he stopped. There’s irony in living a life like that—in finding peace only when he’s become a sitting duck, a _dead_ duck.

He isn’t afraid of dying. He’d come to terms with how easy it is to cast off the mortal coil. The place where fear should be has gone icy numb, dreadfully still like a body that gives up shivering to conserve the brain.

Neil isn’t afraid of death. Instead, he’s fucking _pissed._

All he’s ever done is follow someone else’s lead: his father’s shadow over his neck, his mother’s hand. He’s never been able to do his own thing before Millport—never been able to say the things he wants, or act the way he wants. Everything true to himself had been buried deep, smothered under layers of paranoia and desperation, choked until he didn’t know how to breathe on his own.

And then, _release_. Fear of his father evolved into fear of himself. Who was he when he came to Millport? What did he live for before that? Putting a finger on the impetus is impossible.

His first decision hadn’t been to keep running after Mary’s death. The surge in his bones that carried him west of Las Vegas was an ingrained response, a fight or flight mechanism she had hardwired into him through beatings and vicious words. No, his first decision was months after that.

His decision to stay. His decision to _be_ —not who he should’ve been, as any of the twenty-two names taped to his body, but as who he’d been born to become. Neil Josten was his idea and his alone.

And now he’s going to die for it.

Neil sits in the back of the Civic and tries very hard not to succumb to the horrible rage bubbling under his skin. He’s not sure if it works.

Two and a half hours east of Millport, they pull onto a dirt road that curls around a hill, blocking the highway’s view of their vehicle. Another car sits a couple minutes out next to an abandoned building. Another one of Nathan’s men.

Jackson comes around the side and drags him out by one arm. The dirt burns where it slides against his exposed ankles—orienting himself is near-impossible in handcuffs—and pours hot grit into his socks. Neil tries to focus on that instead of what he knows is the final exchange.

Lola pops open the trunk. She turns and smiles hard enough to split her bottom lip.

“One last bed for you to lie in. Isn’t that nice?”

They toss him in without any fanfare. Lola slips into the empty space beside him and procures another pair of handcuffs for his ankles before taking a gun from Romero.

“No funny business,” she tells him. Her voice is sickly sweet. “One wrong move and I’ll put you out.”

Neil doubts she’ll kill him—there’s obvious orders keeping him alive until they get to wherever—but there are multiple ways to have a slow, painful death. He doesn’t want to test her. He stays silent.

Lola tucks herself into the space left between his body and the trunk latch, nestling close like she’s preparing to nap. The butt of the gun presses cold into his hip. “Close us in,” she demands, and the darkness envelops them both. After a moment the engine starts up and they make back for the road.

Time and space crush themselves down into the contact between their bodies. Neil can feel every exhale on his neck, every twitch of Lola’s muscles against his own. He can feel the road bumping underneath the wheels, the car racing down the highway towards hell.

He wants to be sick. He wants to rip open the trunk and fly out. And yet, the longer he lays there, staring into nothing with his death racing towards him, he feels even the knowledge of his slow death begin to numb him.

Lying there in the dark, feeling Neil Josten drain away from his bones, all Nathaniel feels is certainty. There’s no way out but six feet under.

.

The safe house juts from a hillside like a too-smooth tumor. There are no windows, no marking fences or a doormat. Just a door, caked in dust thick enough to almost allow it to blend into nothing.

Jackson hauls him out of the trunk the same way he threw him in. Nathaniel blinks away burning spots from his vision. Even with the sun setting, the world is far too bright for the end of his life, the sunset hemorrhaging fiery, crimson light over the dunes. It all hardly feels real.

Precious few seconds stretch between his feet hitting grit and his body being forced inside. Nathaniel tilts his head back as far as he can and takes it all in: the sun, the sky, the clouds.

Something ugly and too big to swallow presses at his throat—loss, a sense of forgetting something. Fire burns at the back of his brain in fits and starts. An ocean he can’t see recedes from his feet.

 _I was meant for more than this_ , the voice of Neil whispers. He crushes it down and lets himself be shoved through the doorway.

The safe house is the same as all the others he’s ever been to. There’s a complex of rooms hidden behind a false wall, a rat maze that weaves back into the hillside in an unintelligible pattern. The lights overhead burn blue-white with a fluorescence that makes his eyes ache. Romero and Jackson push him along, ignoring multiple doors before they get to a big, dark kitchen.

There’s one chair at the table.

Before Nathaniel can even think of running, Romero points a gun into his face. Jackson’s grip around his shoulders pinches tight enough to rip his breath away. Ahead of them, Lola clicks on the gas stove and opens a drawer. Knives gleam from inside.

“It’s almost time for dinner,” she says. She turns with a new blade in hand. “Why don’t you get ready, Junior?”

Fear—bitter, heavy, as if he hadn’t feared enough in the past couple hours—crawls up Nathaniel’s throat like an alien creature. He can feel it sliming the back of his throat in acid, weighing his tongue down in his mouth. “Fuck you,” he chokes.

“A little fire still.” Lola tilts her head, watching the stove flames flicker. “We’ll stamp it out of you yet. Don’t worry.”

Lola crawls up onto the table and scoots across to sit directly in front of his chair. Her legs fall to the arms, ankles hooking around the steel; the knife in her hand raises, reflecting the wild light of her eyes. Her gaze rakes over his skin as she licks her cracked lips like she’s ready to swallow him whole.

“First things first,” she says. “Who did you tell? What did you tell them?”

Nathaniel glares up at her. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

It’s the truth—he’d known from day one that he could never tell anyone the whole of it, not even Andrew, without putting their lives in danger—but Lola shakes her head and taps the flat of the blade against her knee.

“I don’t know. What do you think, Ro?”

Romero’s head tilts. His gun is still trained on Nathaniel, unflinching. He shrugs.

Lola smiles with all of her teeth. “Right, then.” She presses the blade to his cheek, letting the edge bite ever so gently. She leans in. “Don’t flinch.”

She pushes in.

Nathaniel can’t help himself—he twitches away, pushing his head back into her other waiting hand. The knife follows as she forces his neck forward, skinning his cheek into a bloody, uneven mess of split meat.

All the air in his lungs turns to lava. He opens his mouth to scream and feels the knife bite deeper, digging and burrowing until it threatens to cut straight through. The world spins, shifts in livid shades of red.

At some point she finishes. The knife moves away. Lola leans back.

The span of one cheek burns white-hot, a pain bright enough to rip his vision away. Nathaniel stares up and up, his insides threatening to tear free of his bones, his eyes searching for something he can’t find. He can barely think through the pain.

“Let’s try this again.” She taps the knife against her knee again. “ _What did you tell them?_ ”

His teeth are clenched too tight to speak. He shakes his head.

“I can’t hear you,” she sing-songs, and picks up the blade again.

The world narrows. Nathaniel stares up at the lights until he’s blind, blinded, burning into the white glow like he’s part of the ashes.

Lola cuts with surgeon precision. His shirt rips at a seam and falls open to bare the skin underneath. She cuts and cuts, pushing here and there just to hear him scream, just to hear the way his voice scrapes his insides raw to match. He can’t stay quiet, but it hurts so much to speak. It hurts, it hurts, it _hurts._

He doesn’t dare look down. He can’t. He’s stuck, stuck sitting here, taking it.

When she leans back again, he doesn’t dare look down. He can’t pinpoint anything below his collarbone beyond a mass agony. Everything _hurts,_ hard enough that he can barely see the lights anymore.

And then Lola gets off the table.

“It’s ready,” Jackson says somewhere past him. His voice rolls low, almost impossible to hold onto.

“Good,” Lola says. There’s a moment of silence, a shifting of metal on metal that terrifies the tiny part of Nathaniel’s brain still holding on. He wants to look. He doesn’t want to look. He wants to be ready. He knows he’ll never be.  

He forces his eyes open. When did they close? Lola stares back at him, back on the table, but something else glows cherry-red in one hand.

 _No. No,_ No—

Lola’s eyes glitter bright, mouth open like she’s having the high of her life. “If you won’t talk,” she breathes, “then I’ll _make_ you talk.” She reaches forward and takes his jaw in one hand, fingernails digging into the mess of his face. “Try to speak clearly, would you?”

“I’ll ask you one more time. _Who did you tell?_ ”

She doesn’t wait for answer. The rod in her hand presses to open flesh.

The world explodes.

He can’t see. He can barely hear the sound—someone screaming, someone begging. He’s beyond it all.

And then he’s nothing. Just as his mother always said he would be.

.

_Where do you think you’re going?_

The beach stretches into infinity. Sand spreads beneath his feet, dry and scorched black, an endless plain that meets the sky somewhere beyond. Smoke curls around him in a dark fog that threads between his fingers and toes and clothes. He shouldn’t be able to breathe through it. He can.

Little things stick out of the ground. He passes them as he walks—to where, he doesn’t know—and even melted, burned, charred, he recognizes their shapes.

An empty ice cream tub. A box of cigarettes. A beanbag.

_You promised you wouldn’t run._

A line of footsteps trail through the sand. They’re smaller than Neil’s own feet, but just barely. He recognizes them, too.

_You promised._

He looks up at the sky. He shouldn’t be able to see the stars through the smoke. He can. They’re just as bright as he remembers them.

He’s always loved the stars. Their sameness is comforting, because it reminds him of—

Oh.

He looks down. The world ahead of him suddenly feels so empty, so full of nothing, that he wants to stop. He wants to lay down. Where else is there to go? There’s nobody here, no goal ahead of him. Everything’s been incinerated into nothing.

Just like the rest of his existence.

 _You promised,_ he reminds Neil. _Are you going to lie to me after all?_

 _It’s not a lie_ , he wants to say. _I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell you.. I wanted to keep you safe. I still do._

_I hate you. You’re a liar, and I hate you._

_I’m not. Not with you._ He blinks, coming to a stop. _And you don’t hate me._

_I do._

_You don’t._

_I_ do.

He can’t rest just yet, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t tempting. The pulse of life in Neil’s chest thrums too loud for this quiet space, too _awake_ for the dream he’s trying to fall into. If he can still dream at all.

 _A truth for a truth,_ he thinks. _Ask me one more. I won’t lie to you._

The world stretches and stretches, thinner and thinner. The stars are setting. The fog is becoming thicker, harder to see through. He looks down. The footsteps are beginning to fade away.

He can’t let them. Even exhausted, wandering through ether, he can’t be alone just yet.

He begins to run.

_Dreams. You never have them?_

A figure appears. It’s too far away to reach, but Neil wants to try anyway. He opens his mouth to call; his lips form alien syllables, a name he doesn’t know.

_Never. But if I could, I would always dream of you._

The figure turns around.

He wakes up.

. 

The world begins in pain.

He feels more than he sees—a blistering wave of fire, furious and all-consuming, eating away at his flesh with hungry tendrils. He’s burning alive.

Nathaniel opens his eyes.

There isn’t a single light overhead. In their absence, a kerosene lamp glows on the ground. Beside it sits Lola.

“Junior.” She adjusts the gun in her grip. “You’re awake.”

Across the room, an industrial sink extends from the wall. Nathaniel twitches. The thought of getting up seems nearly impossible—but he has to.

Lola watches him push into a sitting position, then, slowly stand. She looks almost bored of how cautious he moves, watching him catalogue his soaked clothes and ruined skin. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Nowhere,” he says flatly. The moment of terror is behind them both; all that’s left are permanent, gooey burns and deep cuts that score every inch of open flesh. Scars he’ll carry for the rest of his life—not that he’s going to make it very far. “I’m going to clean these.”

“I don’t think it matters.”

“I’m not you.”

The sink metal stinks of bleach and sterility. He ignores his watering eyes and turns on the tap. The rush of water, lukewarm as it is, sets every inch alight again.

Nathaniel grits his teeth and opens up the soap.

By the time he’s done, he wants to throw up. The damage is beyond anything he’s ever had—burns and cuts, open wounds that spread over his knuckles and hands and arms and—

He stares down into the sink. The bottom barely reflects, giving off hints of shadow and light like waves of sheet metal. He can’t quite see how his face looks—but does he even want to?

Nathaniel stumbles back. There’s nothing to dry himself off with, so he stands, shivering in the cold.

He doesn’t know how long they wait. Time passes in nightmare flashes, speeding up and slowing down with the frantic tick of his heartbeat. There aren’t any lights; there aren’t any clocks. Lola barely moves from her chair. Nathaniel stares at the ceiling and does his best not to let the walls close on him. He thinks of a fleeting dream—a black beach, a world without water. A quiet world far removed.

_Thump._

The sand turns to ash.

_Thump._

The ash turns to smoke.

_Thump._

The smoke in Nathaniel’s brain leaks out of his ears, his eyes, every orifice of his body, choking him from the inside out. The doorknob rattles and he rattles with it. He would throw up if he could remember how.

_What do we do when daddy comes home?_

Nathaniel coughs. He can’t scream—can’t speak, can’t _breathe._ He mouths two words. The door opens.

The specter of Nathaniel Wesninski’s existence looks the same as always, if only a little thinner. He stands in the doorway of the room and fills the space, all black clothes and red hair and eyes icy blue, cold enough to freeze hell over. He is his son’s mirror image, a shadow come back to life.

If only he’d died after all.

“Hello, Junior,” Nathan says.

Nathaniel stands, frozen. He doesn’t know what to say. He can’t say anything at all.

Nathan steps fully into the room. Behind him, the hulking shape of his right-hand man, DiMaccio, shuts the door. The sight of both of them makes Nathaniel want to scream.

His father drifts further in, walking until he’s close enough to waft cologne everywhere. Nathaniel can’t bring himself to look him in the face; instead, he stares at the collar of his shirt. He doesn’t move—not even to protect himself when a fist connects with his open burns. He falls to the ground, temporarily blinded with pain.

Nathan waits for him to stand again. “I said hello.”

There’s no air to speak, but Nathaniel forces his lips to move. It takes too long to push out sound. “Hello.”

“Look at me.”

Nathaniel stares harder. His eyes are almost watering with the effort, but he knows better than to cry. He won’t cry.

Slowly, he drags his gaze up. Blue against blue.

“My son.” Nathan flexes his fingers. “My greatest disappointment. Where’s your mother?”

Nathaniel licks his lips. It doesn’t help; he can’t feel them. “She’s dead. You killed her.”

“I would have remembered that. When?”

He won’t cry. He won’t. “Outside,” Nathaniel whispers. He clears his throat, speaking over the break in his voice. “Outside of Vegas.”

“So it worked. Huh.” Nathan takes a step back, flexing his shoulders. He looks over Nathaniel like he’s nothing, less than nothing, a piece of shit to smash underfoot. “Too bad I wasn’t there to watch her die. Too bad _you_ didn’t die with her.

“But that’s alright. Now that you’re here, we can finally deal with you. Nobody makes a fool out of Nathan and lives. You already knew that, didn’t you?”

Nathaniel trembles. He nods.

“I haven’t decided where to start,” Nathan says. “I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, you know? I want to make it _last._ ” His hand, huge and thick-knuckled, lands on Nathaniel’s shoulder like a blow. He squeezes hard enough to make real tears spring to his son’s eyes, fingers digging deep into covered wounds. “Maybe I’ll skin you alive. Maybe I’ll tear you apart one inch at a time. Whatever I decide, we’re going to start with those tendons in your legs.” He lets go. “You’re never going to run from me ever again.”

The world sharpens through his tears. Nathaniel sucks in air, feeling it rip through his insides. “Fuck you,” he chokes.

Nathan turns back to DiMaccio. In the man’s hands are Nathan’s signature weapons: an axe, huge and dull after years of use, and a cleaver. The edge gleams with lamplight.

Desperation seizes Nathaniel’s limbs. He throws himself sideways, muscles surging with panic, but Lola appears and grabs his arms. They fall down in a tangle: him scrabbling against the concrete floor, her wiry body caging him in. Nathaniel chokes down a sob; his body burns where the wounds chafe against everything.

DiMaccio’s hulking form looms closer. A massive fist curls into Nathaniel’s shirt and drags him out from underneath, raising him until his toes barely touch the ground. He throws him.

Nathaniel slams into the wall and sinks to the ground. His body is a massive ball of agony; the air in his lungs has long evaporated. The world swims in shades of shadow that he can’t see.

A glint of metal is all the warning he has. A cry splinters apart in Nathaniel’s throat as he throws himself aside, narrowly dodging his father’s axe. The metal screams where it hits concrete and bounces back with the force of Nathan’s blow.

Nathaniel scrambles to his feet. Several feet away, Nathan swings his weapons with casual abandon. He almost looks relaxed—flexing muscles, clothes casual and gently rumpled.

Dread is a terrible animal. It cracks ribs; it slashes apart organs. Nathaniel lunges for the door and feels claws shred him from the inside. Every cell in his body shakes with a possession, a blowtorch of fire that rapidly turns everything inside to nothing.

Lola is there before he can remember her. Her knife slashes out, crisscrossing hot lines over existing wounds. Nathaniel dodges her best he can but it isn’t enough—her gun slams over the top of his head, knocking him to knees. The door latch falls from his fingers.

The world spins and spins. There’s a ringing in his ears that sounds like his own screams, but Nathaniel knows he can’t open his mouth. If he starts screaming, he’ll never be able to stop.

Nathan cages him close to the wall. Nathaniel dodges a swipe—he hears where metal scrapes metal above his head—but then a kick slams into his stomach. He falls, catching a second kick on the way down, and Nathan’s crushes his body with both knees.

They’re eye to eye. The axe presses into Nathaniel’s neck, hard enough to pin him to the ground. Hot breath spills over his face like lava.

 “I’m tired of you,” Nathan snarls. His spit stings where it lands on Nathaniel’s burns. “I’m tired of looking at you, I’m tired of _dealing_ with you—” He presses his axe hard enough to make his son gag. “I’m going to slice apart your ankles, I’m going to _rip_ your knees apart, and _then_ —” he leans in, close enough for their eyes to cross, “ _I’m going to rip you apart, piece by piece._ ”

If Nathaniel tried any harder not to scream, he would explode into a thousand pieces. His heart slams against his ribs; his wounds lance fire down every inch of his body. He’s beyond tears, beyond any feeling except sheer, agonizing terror.

“ _No_ ,” Nathaniel gasps. His words wheeze out of him, flaying his throat open. “ _No, please,_ I’ll—I—”

“Lola,” Nathan says. “Would you like the honors?”

 _“_ Please, _please—”_

The door slams open. A rain of gunfire hails overhead, every shot ringing in Nathaniel’s ears like he’s been struck. Behind Nathan’s shoulder he sees Lola shudder. Her body jerks wildly as blood spurts, her gun falling from her fingers—

DiMaccio appears and disappears in an instant, dragging Nathan with him—

Nathaniel curls in on himself. He’s done. He’s gone, gone somewhere past all of this, he _can’t_ —

Silence.

Shivering, shuddering, Nathaniel peeks through his fingers. A line of men have swarmed into the room, all clad in dark, nondescript clothing. Several of them surround a kneeling Nathan, forcing him to the floor. He snarls, spittle flying as one rifle grinds into his shoulder, but he can’t move.

At the door opening, a man appears.

Nathan glares up into Stuart Hatford’s face. He’s red with rage, slick with sweat and blood like a seething bull. “You don’t have the power to be here. You’re on _my_ ground, you think you can get away with—”

Stuart stands over him. He raises his gun and fires two shots into Nathan’s chest. Blood spurts forward, arcing over the ground between them. Nathan’s body slumps to the ground with a soft _thump._

“I just did,” Stuart says.

The room falls deadly silent. Somewhere a heavy grating noise scrapes, over and over, against the walls. After a moment, Nathaniel realizes it’s _him._

Stuart’s eyes flick over and widen. “ _Nathaniel_?”

Someone moves over to help him stand. Nathaniel pulls himself away, hands crammed over his open mouth. He can feel his own spit slicking his palms, leaking against the corners of his mouth. He can’t stop looking at Nathan’s body.

Easy. It had been so _easy._

Stuart looks from Nathan and back. He rushes forward, turning Nathaniel away with one hand. “Don’t look. I’m sorry—Nathaniel—” He blows out air. “Mary?”

Nathaniel stares at the ground. _Dead. Just like that._

Stuart shakes his arm. “Look at me. Mary, where is she?”

 _Dead, dead._ Nathaniel looks up into his eyes. _They’re all dead._ He shakes his head slowly.

Stuart’s shoulders rise and fall. He straightens, stiff with sudden lines that pinch around his mouth. “I see.” He turns back to the cluster of armed men. “Clear out.”

The room erupts into a swarm of rustling fabric and low voices. Nathaniel distantly feels someone ushering him out, out, guiding him through the weaving halls. He can’t stop seeing his father’s body, the way he’d jerked when the bullets tore through him.

Slowly, a feeling begins to rise in his gut. His hands tremble where they grip his tattered shirt, fingers curling so tight that tears begin to form again. He’s in horrible pain—but something else is rising. Rising, rising, like vomit on its way out.

His mouth pulls crooked.

“We’re going to clean this up as best we can,” Stuart is saying ahead of him. “We’ll have to pull some extra measures, but—”

They step outside. The sky is black, an ocean of ink spread to the corners of the earth; the stars against it glitter as always, patterned just the way Nathaniel knew they would be.

“—It’s the least we can do.” He turns back and gives Nathaniel an appraising look. “What do you think?”

Nathaniel stares up at the sky. He opens his mouth to speak—and lets the feeling fall free.

Tears stream from his face. His teeth bite against his split, dry lips. He tries to speak and laughs, laughs until he wheezes, wheezes until he can’t make any sound at all.

It should have been impossible—it _is_ impossible.

Nathan is dead.

He’s finally free.

.

“We’ve had to pull major strings to get here,” Uncle Stuart says. The chauffeur wheels artfully around a three-foot pothole, scraping into the dust, and drives on. “We told the authorities we would take him alive if we could, but—” He pauses, grimacing. “The work is behind us. There isn’t much time before we have to move on again.”

Nathaniel sits in the backseat of his uncle’s car and stares out the window. He can’t stop looking at the hills, dry and ugly as they are. They’re _real_ , vividly so. Just like him.

Alive.

“Nathaniel. Do you understand? I won’t come back for you. I can’t—not again.”

He tears his gaze away from the window. “I understand.”

“And?”

He looks down at his arms.

The work is ugly—barely adequate, a day’s worth of work done by two medics traveling with his uncle’s men. He’s bandaged and doped up on enough painkillers to make his head swim, but even through everything, Nathaniel feels the pulse of his blood in every open wound.

Slowly, he opens and closes one fist. Fire lances from his knuckles, over his wrist, up his arm; he’s horrifically scarred for the rest of his life and he hasn’t even seen his face yet. He’s a mess, ruined flesh and a dead man’s name.

But.

“I can’t,” he whispers.

Maybe they won’t want him, ugly and scarred and shadowed by everything dangerous left in the end of the world—but he has to try.  

Stuart looks at him for a long time. The past day has shaped him for the worse—impossibly tired, terribly old. The creases around his eyes pinch as he stares, silent and unmoving, before looking straight ahead.

“You won’t have any protection.”

Nathaniel slips one finger over new sweatpants and traces the shape of his keys: one for the complex, one for the apartment, one for the man that he calls home.

“No,” he says softly. “I already do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little longer for our boy to rest...


	3. Succession

_Why do people dream?_

It’s easy to give the biological answer: the brain, working in mysterious ways, sorts every image and thought like files in a cabinet. Passing ideas and hidden emotions rise to the surface like a blush, holding the body captive until the dawn rises. People sleep because they must; people dream because they must.

But what about strange phenomena? Seeing the future, seeing an omen, seeing a stranger you’ve never met—is there a scientific explanation for that, too?

Nathaniel doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he believes in fate, doesn’t know if there’s any weight to the fantastical ideas of soulmates or clairvoyance or getting messages from God. Maybe everyone is just crazy.

 _Or maybe_ , he thinks, _it’s just me._

They’ve traveled through the night. The road’s churned out miles beneath their wheels; the sandy mesas have long melted into valleys. The stars wink overhead, faraway and silent in their vigil.

Everything is as it should be—but Nathaniel is still afraid to sleep.

Nathan is dead. He _knows_ he’s dead—he can’t stop replaying the sound of his father’s corpse hitting the ground—but specters don’t always stay buried. It would be too easy to close his eyes and see him again, over and over and over and…

He blinks groggily. The world is beginning to blur together, charcoal shades sliding and smearing across the windows. His heartbeat slows the further they drive into the darkness. Even now, nervous to sleep, he can’t help how his eyelids flutter.

With any luck, maybe he won’t dream at all.

 _Just a minute,_ Nathaniel tells himself. _It’ll be just—_

 

His eyes snap open.

The sun is beginning to set.

The heavy smoke that once hung over the sands are gone. In their absence, the sun shines onto every onyx grain as if they were oil-coated, turning the dunes into an expansive rainbow. The world shimmers with a warmth almost too brilliant to linger on.

A figure stands in the distance. They’re too small to see properly, merely a black blob against the uninterrupted line where the horizon kisses the earth, but Nathaniel’s heart still thumps painfully. He doesn’t dare think; he can’t bear to hope.

Slowly, cautiously, he begins to walk towards them.

The world stretches out with every step. He takes four steps and passes a mile of litter that appears to melt in reverse. Candy wrappers burst from the ground like budding blooms; buildings stretch out of sand like bizarre, wobbling newborn deer.

He picks up the pace. The world is rising, growing, stretching out of charcoal and dust into something colorful. Fiery rays gleam against the sand, turning the ground into a sea of gold before his very eyes. He takes another step and it solidifies into concrete, stone backlit by the warm sun.

Nathaniel sucks in a sharp breath. The figure in the distance is gone, but in its place is a scraggly block of buildings, cream and butter-yellow and orange. Horrible, lurid orange.

Walls solidify under his touch as he passes. A street sign shoots out of the ground like a grey weed, hardening crooked and barely legible. _Welcome to the—_

He breaks into a run. The sun sets in reverse; the sky melds into shades of goldenrod and crimson, a sunset before the sunset. His heart slams a wayward beat against his ribs, in his mouth, on his tongue.

The gate is open. The courtyard is empty. He jogs up the staircase and hooks his hands into the gutter the way he’s done countless times before, pulling himself up onto the lip of the roof—and stops.

The skyline of the city glows—a vivid, blazing sunset that spills glorious fire onto every surface like an eruption of magma. The brilliance of it throws dark spots into his eyes, blinding him before he can think to look away.

 _Home_.

At the edge of the roof is _him_ , standing guard against the night. Buttery rays bathe his hair and clothes in heat, swathing him in the colors that live inside his skin. He’s a pillar of black in a world on fire, a stone keeping the torrent of light at bay.

Nathaniel exhales. The familiar tug of a smile pulls his lips up, then open as he calls his name.

He turns around.

.

“Are you ready?”

Nathaniel blinks awake. The world is disturbingly small and dark compared to the warmth of sleep. He sits up and pops a crick out of his neck; his limbs buzz beneath the wounds, aching like he’s run a long way.

“Sorry,” he tells his uncle. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

Stuart tilts his head. Morning is just beginning to crest over the hilltops, dying his grey streaks pink. “We’re at the city limits.”

So they are. In his few hours of stolen sleep, the world’s begun to light up from the inside in pastel hues. Dew glints against cornhusk-yellow fields and shatters over crumbling sidewalks like diamonds; they drive beneath a stoplight where old flyers flap damply in the wind like sails.

The ugliness of Millport eclipses everything, twining dust with the glow of a new day. Nathaniel wouldn’t have it any other way.

He rolls down the window and sucks in bitter air. Steam curls off the blacktop where the sun hits it, warming the hair curling below his ears like he’s in a sauna. The whole world shimmers with an odd newness, an old shirt gone through the wash until it’s clean and soft.

There’s the Albertson’s, and the 7-Eleven he visited first. There’s the park with its gnarled oaks, its homeless residents curled on the benches. There’s the gas station, and the secondhand mart, and the library where Bee lives.

 _Everything in its place_ , he thinks. _But where is mine?_

The streets shift with a growing restlessness in Nathaniel’s gut, twisting until he can hardly breathe. He almost wants to stop before they get there— _almost._ A younger him might have. But he is tired of running, tired of fitting to the wishes of dead people.

It’s time for him to make his second decision come true.

They turn one final block. Several houses away stands an orange complex, bright like a too-ripe fruit. The welcome sign out front is just as faded as it was two days ago; the rod-iron gate, just as rusted.

Nothing has changed except for him. The realization disturbs him as much as it soothes him.

The car slows to a stop several feet from the front steps. Stuart turns and looks his one and only blood in the eyes.

“Nathaniel,” he sighs. “This is it.” The warning note in his voice speaks a thousand words.

Nathaniel looks out the window. His heart rests in his mouth, raw and ready to leap out from behind his teeth. His palms are sweaty. The urge to run squeaks from inside his gut, small and exhausted.

He quells it. This is _his_ decision, and no ghost can take that away from him. “I’m ready.”

Stuart doesn’t hug him—the years and distance are too wide for them to cross—but his hand falls to Nathaniel’s shoulder and curls gently around it. Warmth from his hand seeps into skin like liquid bravery.

“Do her proud.”

Nathaniel swallows. “Yes sir.”

Nobody stops him from jimmying the gate lock. He walks up the sidewalk unaccosted, stepping into the courtyard as if it were any other day. The grounds are empty aside from Renee pinning her clothes to dry from the second story. She looks down at him, mouth opening in surprise, and nearly drops a fresh blouse into the dirt.

_“Neil.”_

He comes to a stop. Does he even deserve to be called that anymore? _Neil_ is supposed to be dead, torn apart with open wounds. Who is he, exactly?

He doesn’t get a chance to answer, because at that moment, Andrew and company step out of their apartment.

The half-second where Nathaniel turns and looks him in the eye is painfully slow. There’s barely a chance for their gazes to meet—earth and sky, fire and water—before Andrew crosses the distance and grabs his shirt tight enough to nearly choke him.

“Neil,” Nicky gasps. “We, we thought—”

“What are you doing here?” Kevin demands. “You never came back from..” The rest of his words die as he takes him in, bandages and rumpled hair and odd clothes. Nathaniel can’t imagine how haggard he must look. “Wait, where—”

Andrew ignores them all. His fingers clench and unclench around Nathaniel’s shirt like he’s caught between wanting to strangle him and smooth out his wrinkles. Dark eyes rake over the bandages on his face, the gauze peeking out over his shirt collar. Andrew’s mouth pinches tight.

Nathaniel’s stomach won’t stop jumping around. He can feel his pulse fluttering in his gut where his hands are pressed. He swallows, mouth suddenly dry.

“I came back all this way,” he whispers, “and I don’t even get a hello?”

The ferocity in Andrew’s gaze makes Nathaniel’s heart lurch. He looks ready to tear someone apart.

But even with murder in his eyes, his hands still smooth out over Nathaniel’s chest. One finger taps to the frantic rhythm of Nathaniel’s heartbeat before he moves his palms to shoulders and presses them both down into the dirt.

The ground is still damp, leeching cool soil into the knees of Nathaniel’s new sweats. He barely feels it. Andrew won’t stop looking, staring at the bandages on his face like he already knows what’s behind them. One fist curls into the dirt, knuckles all unsheathed knives.

And then he gets to work.

Nathaniel doesn’t know what his wounds look like. The medics traveling with his uncle carried perpetual scowls rivaling his own; when he’d asked them how he was, their faces never changed.

“You’ll live,” one had said, and that was that.

Now, kneeling in the Foxhole Court’s courtyard, Nathaniel feels the natural light expose his face for the first time. The air makes him wince through the painkillers.

Andrew’s expression never changes. He’s silent through the first bandages—cursory cuts, quick and deep to Nathaniel’s right side. They’re shallow enough to heal with simple scars.

The flesh on his left side is not so lucky.

Andrew pulls the bandage off with precise fingers, careful hands. A muscle in his jaw twitches, but he never looks away or changes expression. He sets the gauze down on his thigh gently.

A long moment passes.

“Tell me,” he says. His voice is deadly soft, sharp enough to puncture right between Nathaniel’s ribs. “Tell me who did this.”

Nathaniel swallows. “I—”

“And _don’t_ lie to me.”

He shakes his head. “They’re dead.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I— I’m sorry.”

Fire flares up behind Andrew’s eyes. Every muscle tenses like a too-tight bowstring; his knuckles sink further into the dirt, grinding blindly against the pebbles like he might turn them to dust. His gaze threatens to sear Nathaniel to ash.

“Don’t,” he grits, “say that to me ever again.”

“I wanted to tell you but I couldn’t,” Nathaniel whispers miserably. “I couldn’t, not with him still out there on the loose. I knew he would come for me eventually. I couldn’t tell anyone.”

“I hate you.”

“I had to keep you safe.”  
  
“I _hate_ you,” Andrew hisses. He sucks in a breath, steadying himself. “You lied to me.”

“I came back. That has to account for something.”

Andrew just looks at him. His eyes won’t stop flicking over Nathaniel’s face, taking in his wounds and features like he’s worried he’ll forget something. Finally, his eyes make their way back to Nathaniel’s own. “How did they do it?”

“Hot poker.”

Nicky groans behind them. Nathaniel had almost forgotten they were there; he tilts his head to see their expressions and gives them a full view of his face. The effect is instantaneous: Kevin makes a horrible sound between a squawk and a gasp, touching his own face; Nicky rips his eyes away too late and buries his face in his hands; Aaron turns to grip his shoulders.

And then, beyond them, the other Foxes are arriving.

“Boys,” Dan says, “what—” She sees Nathaniel beyond them and jerks to a stop. “ _Neil._ ”

“Neil?” Wymack echoes behind them. They must all be coming back from errands, because the plastic bags in his hands clink when they hit the ground. In an instant Nathaniel’s surrounded by his family and friends, his neighbors and teammates. Everyone crowds behind Andrew as if desperate to get a good look at him.

Matt catches sight of his face and shudders full-body. Dan’s fingers curl tight into his elbow. “Where.. What—”

“Jesus Christ,” Wymack murmurs, staring at his burns.

It’s almost too much. Something like shame burns the back of Nathaniel’s tongue, peeling away layers from the inside. He doesn’t know what he expected—didn’t know if they would welcome him back at all. He’d been gone for _days._

He looks from face to face, taking in their naked shock and confusion.

Only Andrew stays still. He hasn’t changed expression or moved away since the moment he laid eyes on him.

Nathaniel looks him in the eye. “We should go inside,” he says, loud enough to carry. “I need to tell you guys something.”

.

He tells them everything.

He speaks until his voice is hoarse, until he has to whisper and Renee passes him iced tea. For every secret he exhales, the Foxes inhale; for every truth he gives them, they give back their strength. He’s terrified when he starts, but by the time he’s finished, there’s nothing left inside but a quiet, open sea.

The whole room is quiet.

“So,” Allison says. “All this time we thought you were being cagey..”

“I promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone,” Nathaniel repeats for the fiftieth time. Every time he says it he looks at Andrew. The man hasn’t looked at him since they sat down in Wymack’s living room, but the divots his fingers drive into the cushions speak louder than words. “I had to keep that promise, if nothing else.”

“And now?” Renee prompts.

“Now,” he echoes. “I don’t know.”

Nathaniel looks from face to face. All through his speech he’s noted their shifts in expression, the way they curled in on themselves when he spoke of his father and the people in and out of his house. Renee’s unwavering sadness, Andrew’s stoicism, Wymack’s grim acceptance—they didn’t waver from listening, but they didn’t try to console him either. His life is long beyond consolation of any kind.

He wants to stay. Ugly and twisted as the truth is, he aches with the need. He’s never had any other _home_ , never had anything that felt like proper family, and the idea of it being torn away hurts more than any cut or burn.

 _It’s not up to me_ , he reminds himself. It’s the least he can do, coming in and ruining everything the way he had. _If they don’t want me, I’ll go._

Dan shifts. For the past hour she’s been at Matt’s side; now, she stands and takes Nathaniel’s empty mug from him. She gives him an appraising look.

“Isn’t it obvious?”

He stares up at her.

“Unless you don’t want to stay,” she adds.

Nathaniel swallows. He’s hardly got any air to breathe, much less speak. “Are you sure?”

“You’re family,” she tells him. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”  
  
“You also signed a contract,” Wymack reminds him. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Relief goes down like a stone. He can hardly believe it; he looks from face to face, taking in all of their open, earnest expressions. He feels like he’s drowning. “Are—”

“Neil. _Stay._ ”

It’s all he’s ever need to hear.

“Thank you.” He squeezes his eyes shut, running his hands over the filthy patches on his pants. “Thank you.”

They disperse not long after that. The upperclassmen leave first for lunch, then Nicky and Aaron. Wymack drifts into his kitchen to fire up more hot water for spaghetti. Then, it’s just Kevin and Andrew left and Nathaniel. They all step outside together.

In the time it took for him to come clean, the day has come and nearly gone. Late afternoon clouds streak the blue sky; sun spills like a comforting blanket onto the courtyard, tossing shadows over concrete and balcony railings. Nathaniel sucks in a soft breath and smells the earth, fresh laundry, burning toast.

Everything in its place—including him. _Home._

He gets all the way to his apartment door before he realizes he doesn’t have his keys. He stops, bandaged hand trailing over the busted doorknob. Matt is only one floor away, but the thought of being roped into a meal with the others is too much right now. He just wants to lay down.

“Forgetting something?”

He casts a sideways glance at Andrew. One hand is outstretched; in his palm are Neil’s keys.

One for the complex.

One for the apartment.

And one for Andrew himself, tiny and perfectly polished as the day Nathaniel had let them go.

He takes them without touching his skin. “How?”

Andrew’s mouth tightens. “You left them.”

“And you picked them up?”

Andrew’s gaze slides over his head. “Nobody else was going to,” he mutters. “I had to.”

Something warm flares up inside Nathaniel’s chest. He can’t say if it’s joy, or relief—perhaps some mixture of both—but the heat of it turns his insides molten, lighting him up like a candle. He takes in Andrew’s form, all bright gold and inky black, and relishes the feeling’s spread from head to toe.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Andrew scowls.

“I’m not,” he murmurs, but he can’t bring himself to look away.

They make their way into the apartment. Everything is in exactly the same place as it’d been several days before; even Neil’s used dishes still sit in the sink. It’s as if he’d gone out for a quick excursion instead of a brush with death.

He leaves Andrew on his bed to try showering and rapidly finds that he can barely take off his clothes. Every fine-motor movement of his hands leaves him in unbearable pain; fumbling himself out of his shoelaces is nearly impossible. He takes a moment to sit on the toilet seat and catch his breath—and stops.

There, in the mirror.

_I’m.._

He is the aftermath of a nightmare encounter. Even with gauze and bandages swathing his skin, Nathaniel can see bruising and guess what’s underneath. He’s going to be mutilated beyond repair for his entire life. He won’t be able to look in any mirrors without seeing, and _knowing._

 _Do you know who you are?_ A lost dream hisses from the back of his brain. Nathaniel shies from its grasp desperately.

He hardly notices when Andrew walks in and stands beside him.

They both look in the mirror.

“You’re not him,” Andrew says.

Nathaniel shudders. He can’t make himself look away—can’t make himself stop thinking about what he’s seen and where he’s gone. The enormity of it is beginning to crush him, squeezing the life out of his limbs. A ghost attempting to strangle him after death. “But I could be,” he whispers.

“No.” Andrew steps forward and blocks his vision, forcing him to look away. “No. You can’t. I won’t let you be.”

A heavy lump sits in Nathaniel’s throat. “But I’m—”

“Neil.” Andrew stares intently. “You’re Neil. You don’t have to be anyone else.”

 _You don’t have to be anyone else._ Not anymore.

Andrew’s words hang over them as he turns on the shower. The bathroom fills with steam that fogs up the mirror and cocoons them from the outside world. He turns, eyes trailing over burns and cuts and bandages, before kneeling to pull plastic bags from under the sink. They’re supposed to be for the trash can, but Andrew gets to work in brisk, detached movements, helping remove clothes and fasten bags over ruined fingers.

Fingertips trail tentatively over the scars on his chest. “You’re a mess,” he says plaintively.

Neil can’t help it. He laughs.

They get into the shower without another word: Neil, bagged but bare, and Andrew in his clothes. Hot water spills over flesh and cotton alike; rivulets press into Andrew’s chest and thighs, plastering clothes to muscle and bone. Neil stands under the steam and marvels at the sight until he’s nudged into stepping forward.

It should be awkward getting his hair washed by someone else like this, but it isn’t. Neil appreciates the way Andrew works shampoo and conditioner through his locks, pressing suds into his scalp in a calm, clinical manner. The rhythm of his fingers scraping around Neil’s ears soothes him until he’s almost asleep standing up.

When Andrew nudges him backward to rinse, he finally musters the strength to open his eyes again. Suds curl away from Andrew’s hands, glimmering and bubbling up to his elbows; the heat of the steam has long flushed his skin until he’s pink all over, damp hair curling where the air brushes it dry. He’s soaking wet and almost too handsome for Neil to bear.

“Hey,” he murmurs, leaning in.

Andrew’s eyes meet his through the steam. The embers within burn bright enough to glow, warm enough to pool heat into every nook of Neil’s body. He’s deliciously soaked in the warmth of Andrew’s gaze—a harmony of ice and fire, water and flame.

The last kiss they shared on the rooftop feels like ages ago. Neil remembers the taste of sugar on Andrew’s tongue, the way the cigarette in his fingers burned down to ash before they could finish it; he aches for Andrew touch, the searing balm of his fingertips.

“Andrew,” he whispers.

One soapy hand slips from the crook of his neck to the line of his collarbone. A thumb trails the length of it; a calloused palm spreads warmth over his chest, stopping right where his heart beats steadily under his ribs. The beat of it sings one word, over and over.

_Home. Home. Home._

Andrew slides one hand up to cradle Neil’s jaw. Fingertips scratch into the wet, loose curls of hair. He leans in, pressing their foreheads together, his breath fanning over Neil’s lips in a warm wash.

Andrew doesn’t even have to ask. “Yes,” Neil breathes. “ _Yes.”_

_It will always be yes with you._

Their mouths meet in a wash of heat. Andrew’s hands slip to cradle his neck and anchor him at his hip. His fingertips press in with delicious strength, just hard enough to massage the tired muscles beneath slick skin.

Neil opens up and lets him in, breathing in every exhale, swallowing and swallowing until he’s nothing but fire inside, fire and flame and ash.

.

The days pass. Neil wakes up every day and watches his own healing process, cleaning and redressing everything before looking in the mirror. The fear of his meeting his reflection slowly begins to fade; he finds that, ugly as the burns are, they make him look less like his father’s ghost. He grows to like them in his own way.

The nights pass. Sometimes he wakes in his sleep and frantically fumbles for a light—those are the nights where he’s soaked in sweat, grateful that his dreams don’t stay with him when he wakes. He lies awake until the sun rises on nights like those.

But, more often than not, Neil doesn’t wake at all. He stays up late to share smoke or kisses with Andrew until they both slip through their skylights and sleep. Those are the nights he loves best: ash buried into rooftop grit, smoke trailing overhead to mix with the stars.

If the other Foxes know of his and Andrew’s thing—because it _is_ a thing, even if Andrew doesn’t say so outright—they don’t pick on them. Sometimes Renee will see him crawl to the roof and smile knowingly; sometimes Matt lets him have the room to himself for an evening. Their noise means little to Andrew, but Neil likes holding his hand under the table at team picnics. It’s satisfying for him if nobody else.

And if Andrew squeezes a little tighter when Neil tries to pull away— well. Nobody knows except for them.  

.

The last day of summer comes, and with it, comes change.

“We should have done it weeks ago, to be honest.” Matt shovels another spoonful of chocolate cereal into his mouth. He chews with a gusto that Neil’s long grown fond of, even if he’ll never say so out loud. “When you got back, I mean. Would’ve been too hot though.”

Neil still thinks it’s plenty hot, but he keeps that opinion to himself. Compared to the other Foxes who’ve long grown used to California’s blazing days and bewilderingly cool nights, he’s got plenty of growing room to fill. Plenty of time to fill it with, too.

They finish their last breakfast as roommates in companionable silence. The boxes are already packed, so it doesn’t take too long to move everything down the hall. The morning passes in a haze of sweat and dust, orange paint and red behind Neil’s eyelids when he blinks. Things stack up onto the spare bed in Dan’s apartment; the bedroom of apartment _203_ empties until only Neil’s sparse things remain.

Matt stands in the apartment doorway and heaves a sigh. He’s wearing his ridiculous orange bandanna—one that matches every other Foxes’, courtesy of Nicky’s latest secondhand shop raid—and a Space Jam tank that Neil drowned in the one time he accidentally put it on thinking it was his.

“Good memories in here,” he says wistfully, and turns to flash Neil a smile. “Take good care of the stains, yeah? I’d be hurt to show up and see you bleached them out or something.”

Neil can’t help but crack a smile of his own. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Hey, guys!” Nicky’s head pops over the top of the stairwell. “Some help over here? Andrew’s desk is freakishly heavy.”  
  
“I didn’t ask you to help,” someone mutters below.

“I’m your cousin! If you think I’m going to miss move-in-with-the-boyfriend day, you’ve got another thing coming.” Nicky hefts his end of the furniture and grimaces. “What’s in this desk anyway, _rocks_?”

“My weights,” Andrew says, just a little smug. Nicky squawks in protest.

“Let me help with that,” Matt laughs, and jogs forward to catch a corner.

By the time they’re all done, the jumble of Matt’s furniture has been replaced by a bed with dark sheets and a desk scored with pen nibs and little carvings. There’s new junk food nestling in the cupboards with Neil’s veggie crisps; a new couch sits over the carpet stains Matt’s beanbags revealed. The bathroom has two more bottles of soap alongside Neil’s own.

It’s both the same and a little different—a change that feels _right_ in Neil’s bones, like he’s settling once and for all.

“Stop looking like that.” Andrew frowns, fingers tilting Neil’s chin away. “You look ridiculous.”

“I’m not doing anything,” Neil says, but he can’t stop smiling. He hasn’t been able to stop since the last box emptied, cardboard out with the recycling.

“Stop,” Andrew insists.

The corner of Neil’s mouth tugs higher. It feels a little strange around his healed flesh, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. It never will ever again. “Make me,” he breathes, and Andrew does.

A housewarming party is inevitable according to Allison, but for the first night, it’s just them. Neil pulls frozen chicken out of the freezer to heat; Andrew tears into a bag of Hawaiian rolls and crams one into his mouth. The _thump_ of Aaron and Nicky’s bass echoes from where the front screen is open to let in cool air.

They eat and smoke on the roof— _their_ roof, Neil reminds himself. The sun sets in a blaze of furious life, red petals blooming from the sun’s golden bud, and Andrew blooms with it. Neil leans back on his hands and marvels how the colors dance over his hair, his eyelashes, his clothes, until the only colors left in the sky are too dark to distinguish. They sit and kiss and trade whispered jabs until the weight on Neil’s eyelids become too heavy to ignore, and then they go inside to kiss a little more and get ready for bed.

Neil tucks himself into the spot at Andrew’s side. Maybe some nights he’ll need to use the other bed, but tonight is a night to share. He lays out under the crook of Andrew’s arm and lets his hand press over the man’s heart, feeling out the rhythmic thrum of his existence fighting on. He smiles through the dark.

“Go to sleep,” Andrew tells him. “I'll be here when you wake up.”

Neil closes his eyes.

He sleeps—dreaming of fire, of black rain and white stars, of brown eyes that turn him to ash on the wind.

He sleeps, and dreams of everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To every reader who's left this series a kudos, comment, or subscribe: thank you so much! I started writing DOF in May as a desperate reprieve from studying for finals.. I didn't intend to publish anything for AFTG at that point, but I've had so much fun hearing people's reactions through the last couple of months! 
> 
> As the series was intended, I have one last piece that ties it to DOBG's beginning. It'll take me a little while to post it since there are other projects I'm excited to share (!!) but whether or not you read it, I appreciate everyone for getting this far. Thank you for reading! (:
> 
> [playlist for this series](https://open.spotify.com/user/xelaperez36/playlist/59jW12FLhAIpr97AvwOoLm?si=5aSqnDwvRtmaHLgbes_qGQ) | [tumblr](http://poetatertot.tumblr.com/)

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to leave a comment below or visit me on [tumblr](http://poetatertot.tumblr.com/)! I drop updates and answer questions there for anyone interested.
> 
>  
> 
> [playlist for this series](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/59jW12FLhAIpr97AvwOoLm)


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